Last week, we received an interesting request from a company having offices all over Germany and as a consequence managing hundreds of rental agreements.

Payments of the rents need to be confirmed on a monthly basis by the contract manager of the company. Beside the confirmation, the contract manager needs to produce on a monthly basis a list of all rents to be paid in a format that can be imported in Datev which is widespread accounting software in Germany. Once imported, payment will be based on that list.

At this time he is managing the contracts in a worksheet and a worksheet is really fine for creating text files for doing the import but suboptimal for managing contracts as it will not send out reminders for expiry dates and other contract milestones, restrict access to different users, view documents etc.
So what needed to be done for enabling this?

First, we created some fields to be able to enter the typical information of a rental agreement like square meters, bank guarantees etc.
Secondly, we created fields for information needed for the import like debit and credit account numbers, if VAT is applicable etc.
Than we assigned the fields to the agreement type “rental agreement” for having the fields shown in the input mask and created two reports for the user. The first one to verify easily the data and a second report to export the necessary data to a text file for the import.

This is probably an uncommon way of using the software but we were glad to help. If you have a similar case and not sure how to solve it, please drop us an email and we will verify the possibilities with you.

To see how you can create fields and add them to a contract type, please have a look at following video tutorial.